Tabitha Vogelaar

Wesley Neelen

Hackers Handshake – Photo exhibition brings helpful hackers up close

Hackers are generally portrayed in the media with hoodies, masks, or shadowed faces to underline their criminal intent. This exhibition displays helpful hackers who seek, find, and report vulnerabilities in computer systems in order to improve security. They report their findings to the owners of the vulnerable systems first and then to the hacker community, governments, and businesses that may have a concern in such a system. This practice is currently known as Responsible Disclosure, or Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure. The Netherlands is spearheading this way of collaborating with hackers.

Photographer Tobias Groenland collaborated from 2014 to 2018 with writer Chris van ‘t Hof to bring this diverse group of helpful hackers up close to you in image and story. Each hacker was asked to think of their favourite programming language or hacking technique during the photography session.

The term ‘handshake’ refers to the process of setting the rules of communication between two computers. Once both sides agree, they can establish a trusted connection, recognisable, for example, in the ‘s’ (for ‘secure’) in ‘https:’, and in the small lock displayed in your web browser. This exhibition aims to establish a trustworthy connection between the viewer and hacker to disclose vulnerabilities, fix them, and make the internet safer together.

Exhibition opening – Atrium The Hague

Exhibition impression – Atrium The Hague

Exhibition

The following individuals and their portraits are included in the exhibition.

The artworks are displayed on a steel tube frame. Next to the prints a display is shown with the title and all information about the photography project. Prints are on display during the following events.

Stef

Stef

Stef

Stef

Dutch hacker portraits – Visualising code

Programmers, hackers and cryptographers

This series of studio portraits were taken between October 2014 and June 2018. With this project I create photographic portraits of individuals who work in the field of computer engineering. These people work on a daily basis with various programming languages, they can be considered hackers, tinkerers and mechanics. This sub scene is formed by enthusiastic individuals, who have an extraordinary interest in computers networks and other hardware involved. The young individuals are passionate about machines with silicon chips and often want to know every last detail of the hardware and software. For these series I asked the hackers to visualize their code and programming language while they were being photographed.

HackersHandshake – Dutch hackers responsibly disclosed

Exhibition project

The upcoming exhibition is called “Hackers Handshake” which refers to the handshake process between client and server during the negotiation of a secure connection. A successful handshake will result in a secure and encrypted connection. For the end user this is also known as https or the green SSL certificate shown in the browser during the visit of a website. The friendly handshake is what helps to start the conversation between hackers and system owners about responsible disclosure concerning cybersecurity related vulnerabilities. Together both parties can benefit from a good partnership between ethical hacking and the right workflow handling these vulnerabilities. These hackers help improving security by breaking code and reporting it to the people who can fix it – a practice called Responsible Disclosure, or Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure.

Don

Milou

Milou

Milou

Joep

Joep

Jelger

Sander

Eric

The Diversity Company

Sander

Repudo

Marcellien

Radio Host

Mike

Appsterdam

Mike

Appsterdam

Pieter

ZuiderMRKT

Pieter

ZuiderMRKT

Salar

Silkapp

Welmoed

Radio Host

Mike

Appsterdam

Don

Startup Weekend

Amsterdam FM portraits

A series of portraits of entrepreneurs and radio crew, shot at the show called “Goede Zaken” of Amsterdam FM. New guests of the radio show were photographed in the studio every week. These portraits are used as promotional material for the website of Amsterdam FM.